Microsoft's Vine: Emergency Social Networking

Microsoft Tuesday launched a private beta of its new Vine service, which is designed to allow small groups and organizations to trade vital information. Vine is a downloadable application that allows you to send out Twitter-style alerts, disseminate reports with more complete information, and keep track of your Vine contacts.

That may sound a lot like a social network, but Vine was built solely as a way to organize and disseminate important information among organizations such as sports teams, church groups, and advocacy organizations, or to stay in touch with neighbors, family, and friends during an emergency. Right now, Vine is only available for computers running Windows XP with SP2 or Windows Vista 32- and 64-bit editions.

Vine starts at the dashboard, which pops up as a widget-like window on your desktop. You sign in to Vine using your Windows Live ID (Microsoft has not said whether your Messenger contacts would be automatically pulled in to your Vine network). Vine lets you control the information you want to send out by organizing your contacts into groups; it also lets you decide who can send information to you.

Vine's reports section lets you get the word out with four basic message templates: let your family know you're safe; notify a neighbor that you're going to be out of town; keep people informed of situations that matter; and general information. Reports can be used to send out scheduling information, trade news reports, and other detailed information. And if you want to be certain that members of a particular group receive your alert you can also send out direct text messages or emails from Vine's dashboard.

You also can use Vine to discover information about a specific area. For example, say a tornado tears through Oklahoma City and you want to check that your friends and family are safe. You select Oklahoma City from a predefined list that you created earlier and the map zooms in on that location. Vine then culls information from more than 20,000 news sources and public information services including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Any notices relevant to Oklahoma City appear as a blue pop up and you can then choose to open the full story in a Web browser. Below the places map is a smaller map with little pins representing the people in your Vine network. If anyone has sent you an alert, report, or updated their Facebook status you will be notified on the dashboard. You can also send and receive Vine alerts via text message or e-mail.

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